Analyzing Campaign contributions for Auditor contenders

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We recently reported on the campaign contributions in the City of Albany's 2025 Democratic Mayoral Primary Contenders.  The other highly visible and contested primary in 2025 was for City Auditor. There were three candidates: Sam Fein, David Galin, and John Rosenzweig.  With this data story our goal is to similarly examine the donations each candidates received and the trends between them. 

All data used in this analysis was obtained from NYS board of elections website: https://publicreporting.elections.ny.gov/ContributionsByRecipient/ContributionsByRecipient

As with the mayoral candidates, because each candidate announced their candidacy at different times, both officially and unofficially, we elected to start our analysis October 1, 2024.  Fein and Rosenzweig have records that predate this from other elected positions they’ve held or sought.  For this analysis, we only analyzed records that were associated with “Auditor” from the NYS BOE website. Here’s a quick breakdown:

This data shows that Fein received the most contributions and raised the most money relative to Galin and Rosenzweig.  The average contribution to Rosenzweig was nearly double that of Fein and Galin, but he had a fraction of the donors of Fein and Galin. 

We created histograms showing the number of contributions and the amount donated.  What we were looking at were the number of “small” donations, that is all those that fell into the first bin, which was all donations below $250, and those in excess of $1,000. Fein had 424 small and 12 large donations, Galin had 291 small and 13 large donations, and Rosenzweig had 82 small and 15 large donations.  

We then looked at the total number of donations and the total contributions received each month. The primary purpose of this was to see if there were consistent trends between the two, and to a lesser extent, between candidates. As with the mayoral data, we plotted each candidate separately. 

In the above figure we looked at a running sum of all funds each candidate received since Oct. 2024. This data shows Fein campaign receiving more funds earlier than Galin and Rosenzweig and maintaining a significant lead in this regard. Fein ultimately won the June 2025 Democratic primary.  

The last piece of data we examined was the amount of “outside” money each candidate received. Here we define “outside” as donations that do not list “Albany” as the city of the donor. The data show that over half the money Fein received was from “outside” sources, where Galin received just less than half, and Rosenzweig had just over 40%.